Blogs

AIXpert Blog

About this blog

AIXpert Blog is about the AIX operating system from IBM running on POWER based machines called Power Systems and software related to it like PowerVM for virtualisation, PowerVC for Deploying VM's and PowerSC for security plus performance monitoring and nmon

Tags

Recent tweets

Hi, I am preparing for a Power Systems Technical University in Las Vegas, USA and Lyon, France in October. I have a session with the title below and I am seeking feedback from technology guru's like yourselves. Which four of the below ten technologies do you think are "most likely to be normal in five years time"? Please comment on this AIXpert (see "Add a Comment" below) with your four top technologies. I will post the overall results as a graph in roughly two weeks time. Below here there should be a large image of the ten... [More]

AIX 6.1 TL04 sp3 supports the new POWER7 machines like Power 750, 77 and 780, where CPUs can be run at slower speeds to reduce electrical energy use when not busy. This feature is switched on by Systems Director and the Active Energy Manager plugin which talks to the service processor to enables it. I like the "Dynamic Power Saving - Favour Performance" option. From the AIX end, the pmcycles command is used to find your current CPU frequency. Before switching on the energy saving: # pmcycles -M This machine runs at 3550 MHz - This... [More]

This is part 2 of Systems Director licensing or at least working out what you are doing with System Director that requires a license. In part 1, we looked at listing (via the command line) the POWER machines that Systems Director was connected too. This time we what to find out the machines that Active Energy Manager (AEM) is controlling. Once you have installed AEM it is tempting to start monitoring and controlling all your Power Systems electrical use and temperatures but you should only use AEM if you have a license for AEM for each... [More]

Here are the results from 40 techinical IBMers, 300 people at the Las Vegas Technical University (mostly customers, some business partners and a few IBMers) and 90 more from the same event in Lyon, France. Remember this contains no announcements, the technology is available now and the choice of technology is entirely my own. Voters were allowed to vote for 4 out of the 10 and the results are percentages. All technologies got votes, so there is no failures here, even the lowest scoring one had ~47 votes. My comments: Clearly, Solid State... [More]

OK, this is "blowing my own trumpet" a little but I just finished a 12 minute movie on the best bits of Systems Director. Best in the sense that they "save me a lot of time" and you might like to take a look to see if they can help you too. As I run lots of POWER based machines and lots of copies of AIX, this is why it is very relevant to this AIXpert Blog. The 8 areas are: One Hour Install, Update Manager - HMC, Firmware & AIX in four mouse clicks, Whole
Machine Performance View, LPAR direct to HMC, Active Energy... [More]